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The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears.

Baron de Montesquieu

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Baron de Montesquieu
Groundless
Succession
Hopes
Fears
Vain
Men
Life

More quotes by Baron de Montesquieu

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Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.
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I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about.
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When the [law making] and [law enforcement] powers are united in the same person... there can be no liberty.
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Power ought to serve as a check to power.
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Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.
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I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
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The less men think, the more they talk.
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The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset nature on our behalf.
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Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.
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Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.
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There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.
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In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.
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The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.
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Great commanders write their actions with simplicity because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
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Trade is the best cure for prejudice.
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The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.
Baron de Montesquieu
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Love of the republic in a democracy, is a love of the democracy love of the democracy is that of equality. Love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality.
Baron de Montesquieu
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I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.
Baron de Montesquieu
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An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.
Baron de Montesquieu